The Sea Watch sota-6

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The door ahead of him swung open at a touch, a little water gushing past his feet. The next door would take him into the ocean.

  And yet he paused. There could be insurgents waiting just beyond, hanging in the water, staking out his private dock. After all, they knew about it – when Paladrya and that cursed land-kinden had been taken from his oubliette, it had been this way they had come to escape. This, his private egress into the sea, and it had been sullied by base freebooters and fleeing prisoners.

  He paused then because, of course, this hatch only opened outwards and, in all the excitement about the prisoners’ exit, he had never considered how their rescuers had got in.

  He reached his hands towards the hatch once more, but hesitated. What if there was somebody out there?

  And in the trembling fastness of his mind he heard the mocking words: Oh, there’s nobody out here, Claeon. Nobody at all.

  ‘Arkeuthys?’ He spoke the name out loud, unable to stop himself.

  Indeed. That familiar pressure, the great mind of the sea monster.

  You betrayed me! Claeon sent back to it, agonized. Why?

  The boy is persuasive, the giant octopus replied idly. Come out, Claeon. Come into my arms and let me finish this. Your head would make a valuable gift.

  If you truly wanted to kill me, then you’d not have warned me, Claeon divined.

  Perhaps that is the extent of my sentiment, came the murmured reply, like distant rocks falling. Ah, Claeon, we have had such times together, have we not? We have been partners in each other’s misdeeds.

  But you betrayed me! Claeon insisted. You were always my other half. You took joy in the work I set you! Why throw that away now?

  Arkeuthys chuckled, unrepentant. Well, I always thought that I had matched you in wickedness for wickedness, Claeon, but then the boy explained to me that I had just been loyal to the man everyone thought was the true Edmir, so I decided that I would rather be the other half of someone less demanding. It’s over, Claeon. Give up now. Perhaps the boy will just hang you in a cage as a warning, rather than peeling your skin off.

  Claeon whimpered and backed away, clutching the heavy maul closer to him, and then he was bolting back up into the main body of the palace, clumsy in his armour, rebounding from the walls and staggering. He could hear the sounds of the fighting getting closer every moment, it seemed, and he had only one place to go.

  The throne room, his sanctum, provided no shelter now, but where else was there for an Edmir to meet his end?

  He stumbled through the passageways of his palace, all abandoned now – as he had been abandoned, save by those fools currently being butchered under the incompetent command of Pellectes. Littoralists! I should never have reached out my hand to them. This is all Pellectes’s fault! If he hadn’t had me kidnap the landsman… but then how would I have enticed Rosander to keep the peace for me, save by dangling the land before him like a dead fish?

  And he burst into the throne room, seeing the seat of all his power and command, yet taking no joy from it.

  His throne room had a door, though it was very rarely closed. Now he got his hands about the rim and hauled at it until the valve-like disc closed shut behind him.

  But there was no way to seal it. This was no pressure door, such as led into the ocean. Aradocles could pry it open with ease. Claeon had always relied on guards to keep out his enemies. Now he had no guard but himself.

  He thought he could hear shouting beyond the closed portal. Were the cursed boy and his landsmen even now approaching, calling out his name? Claeon whimpered with dread and hate, raising up his maul. Can it be done? Then I shall do it. With a great cry, he launched the weapon’s beaked head at the door’s hinge, striking away jagged fragments of stony stuff, compacting the hollow chambers of the coral. Shouting incoherently, he struck four, five times, smashing the substance of the frame, pressing it in on itself. Either the door would fall completely away, leaving him not greatly worse off than he was before, or…

  Panting heavily he stepped back and looked at his handiwork. He had exposed the tombs of a thousand tiny creatures: the barren little cells that their brethren had sealed them up inside, when they were built over, when Hermatyre was being laid down. The door still held its place, though and, when he tugged at it, it was wedged solid. He had now sealed himself within his throne room.

  ‘What have you done?’ a woman’s voice demanded, and he whirled about with his maul raised. Stepping from behind the throne came Haelyn, his majordomo. The Sepia-kinden woman looked aghast.

  ‘My throne,’ Claeon snarled. ‘I am the Edmir, no other. He shall not have it. This is mine.’

  ‘And what will you do now?’ Haelyn asked incredulously. ‘Do you think they won’t find a way in? And if they don’t, will you starve? Or what?’

  ‘I will defy them to my last breath. If I die, I shall be the last Edmir of Hermatyre to sit here and rule.’

  ‘Claeon, listen to me,’ she insisted, ‘there is another way. For all that has gone wrong between you, Aradocles is your nephew still. If you beg it of him, he will be merciful.’

  ‘Why?’ The Edmir scowled at her. ‘Why mercy, when he has me by the throat? Mercy is not for Edmirs. Mercy is only for the weak.’

  ‘What other chance have you?’ she yelled at him, stepping down from the dais. ‘Listen to yourself, Claeon!’

  His eyes narrowed abruptly, and she stopped. ‘Who let them in, Haelyn?’

  ‘Who let who in?’

  ‘When they stole those land-kinden from my oubliette, when they took my dear Paladrya from me, who let them in? Who was it who betrayed me? I am betrayed, and who better for that than one who held my utmost confidence?’

  Until then, he had only the faintest suspicion, his paranoia seeking any target, but now he saw the faintest flush of colours swirling over her skin. A flinch, a twitch of guilt, revealed even under the shadows of her Art, and he knew.

  ‘Traitor!’ he shrieked, and in the next moment he was running at her, maul upraised. She retreated upwards beside the throne, shouting his name, but he was done with that – done with her. His majordomos always failed him, sooner or later. Well, this last one would not survive him. He would regret only that he could not finish her off properly, and at his leisure, but perhaps it was fitting that his last act as Edmir should be a brutal one.

  She dodged behind the throne, and his next swing smashed the back of it in a cloud of fragments, obliterating its beauty in a single moment. He would indeed be the last Edmir to govern Hermatyre from that seat. Haelyn retreated and retreated, but Claeon was mad with fury now, whirling the maul about him, cracking dents in the floor, in the walls, until at last she tripped and fell.

  She screamed, and he savoured it, standing over her with the comforting weight of the maul in his hands. It was grimed now with pulverized coral, but he’d wash that off soon enough. He raised it high.

  Her eyes had slipped away from the weapon, from his own gaze. She was staring now at something beyond him. He was a fool for doing so, but he could not stop himself craning around to look.

  The Arketoi stood there, some half-dozen of them: pallid little hairless men and women, tattooed and almost naked, as like unto each other as siblings. They stared at him wordlessly, for they never spoke. Even as he watched, a few more of them trickled into the throne room, twisting their way through the walls, walking somehow in between the infinitesimal spaces between the dead coral. Some had gone over to the door, and were examining its smashed hinge.

  ‘Do not touch that! Do not heal it!’ Claeon protested. The majority of the Arketoi just stared at him reproachfully. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

  ‘You hurt the colony,’ Haelyn whispered. ‘You hurt them.’

  Claeon snarled. ‘It’s my colony! I’m the Edmir!’ But he saw Haelyn’s face and her immediate reaction. It’s their colony. It always has been. We are but guests.

  The Arketoi began shuffling towards him, and he threatened them with his maul. One by
one, they raised their hands towards him, as if in salute.

  ‘Get back!’ Claeon howled. He struck one a blow with the maul – not solidly, but the little man was such a frail piece of work that he crumpled immediately. The others simply came on at him, reaching out with their pale fingers. More and more of them crept into the room from every crack and corner, from nowhere at all. There were twenty – no thirty, at least – all focusing only on Claeon.

  He swung the maul to all sides of him, catching another pair, but then they reached him, and Haelyn screamed again, not from fear for herself but for what they then did.

  When Aradocles, Stenwold and Paladrya finally entered the throne room, through a perfectly functional door, they discovered Haelyn pressed against one wall, hands covering her mouth, and, in the centre of the room, nothing but the rough shape of a man – as though a statue had been abandoned to the ocean many decades past, and become thoroughly encrusted over by barnacles and coral.

  Forty-Six

  ‘You know what you’re doing, of course,’ remarked Tomasso philosophically.

  Stenwold just shrugged, his eyes fixed on the sea. Overhead the Tidenfree’s sails bellied and flapped, lowered halfway and turned from the wind so that the crew could let down the ship’s boat in safety.

  ‘Still in sight of Collegium harbour, as well,’ said the Fly captain, approvingly. ‘A right piece of theatre. I’ll wager they’re cramming the sea wall with telescopes in their hands. You’re a man with a knack for building your own legend.’

  ‘I never wanted a legend,’ Stenwold said softly. ‘If I could have lived my whole life merely as a tinker and a scholar, that would have suited me.’

  Tomasso made a rude noise, and then said, more solicitously, ‘You don’t want anyone along with you? You’re sure, now? I’ve got good hands here, who’d gladly do it. Stab me, but Laszlo would come, if only he had four whole limbs. I’d not be able to keep him back. Prefers you to me, these days.’

  ‘We went through a lot together,’ said Stenwold fondly. ‘No – no others. Anyone with me is a hostage being handed to the enemy.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Tomasso. ‘Ready the boat. Master Maker’s fixing to leave us.’

  Parting had been hard, after all that dagger work had been done. Aradocles had wanted him to stay just a little longer. There was to be a procession, a ceremony, where the boy would make pledges to the people of Hermatyre such as an Edmir had never offered before. He was going to make Salma proud of him, Stenwold knew. He would rule the colony as a true Commonweal prince, whose first concern must always – or should always – be for the well-being of his subjects.

  But Stenwold could hear a clock ticking in the back of his mind. How long for them to raise their grand armada, and sail on Collegium? How long for the Black and Gold to take note and start their next grand war? He had made his apologies, after begging one simple audience with the new Edmir. After that, he had headed for the water, where Wys’s submersible was waiting to carry him, as swiftly as possible, back to his home.

  The ratcheting of the hoist brought him back to the here and now. Despard the artificer was supervising the little tub’s swinging, positioning it over the water beyond the rail’s edge. This was a tiny little boat for a big Beetle man, but it was not as though he would need to do much rowing in it. His destination was coming to him.

  He cast another look at the sea, and then back to Tomasso. ‘You’re sure you can get under way in time?’

  ‘We’ll go wide, let the engine take us into the wind,’ the Fly explained. ‘We’re faster than any of theirs, towards that point of the compass. Don’t you worry about us, Master Maker.’

  ‘Stenwold. Call me Stenwold, Tomasso. If anyone’s earned that, you and your people certainly have.’

  Tomasso had been there, of course, at the urgent and secret meeting Stenwold had called as soon as he struck land. It had been a matter of putting his affairs in order, of making sure that everything was set and in place, in case… well, just in case.

  Tomasso and Wys, and an increasingly incredulous Jodry Drillen, these had been his co-conspirators. A precious two hours of his life had been spent explaining to the Speaker for the Assembly just who Wys was, and where she came from. At the end of that, Jodry had been sitting back in his seat, mouth hanging open, the frontiers of his world now pushed beyond the horizon in an unexpected direction.

  ‘Just what am I expected to do with all of this?’ he had demanded of Stenwold. And then Stenwold had told him, laid it out for him: the secret deal that he had told nobody of until then. Tomasso and Wys had been given their first hearing of it then, as well, and Stenwold had been desperately trusting to his assessment of them – that what he was offering would be appealing enough, and that they were honest enough, to make it work. Honest enough in their own way, of course, for a pirate and a mercenary. Stenwold had always found himself mixing with people like that, whose lives were bought and sold. He knew two types: those that wanted enough, and those that wanted it all. He could only hope he was right in assuming that Tomasso and Wys were amongst the first and not the second.

  ‘You’re happy with the arrangements?’ he asked, stepping out into the Tidenfree’s little boat. He knew that it was too late now, if Tomasso decided to change the deal, but he felt driven to ask, even so.

  ‘Oh, you’re right there, Stenwold,’ the black-bearded Fly agreed with a grin. ‘You came through for us, all right – and then some.’ There had been all the respectability that a Fly-kinden family could dream of, as part of that deal. Tomasso would have Jodry’s seal of approval, a mercantile contact of the first water, and never a whiff of piracy. There would be a College scholarship waiting for whoever Tomasso chose to send, and citizenship for the entire crew. Stenwold reckoned that, amongst those flying through the rigging or hauling on the ropes, there was probably at least one new Assembler here, give it a few years. But there was more to it than that, for Tomasso would have more than just empty promises backing his new position in the city.

  He had laid it out piece by piece, at that secret and hasty meeting. It was an arrangement he had been given plenty of time to construct, as he was passed from one set of sea-kinden hands to another. This had to work for everyone.

  ‘First,’ he had told Jodry, ‘forget about everything you just heard. Nobody must know.’ He looked from surprised face to surprised face and smiled sadly. ‘We are not yet ready for the sea-kinden, and they are not ready for us. There’s a thousand years and more of prejudice on their side: they think we’re monsters; some of them think we’re their ancient enemies – and perhaps we are. But it’s more than that. It’s economics, merchant business. All of us here know how the business of merchants is the real crank handle of the world, without which nothing turns.’

  The little boat rocked as they lowered it, the ropes straining under the load. Stenwold tried to compose himself, aware that, even if matters went well for Collegium here, he could still find himself in a bad way soon enough.

  ‘What do we have that the sea-kinden might want?’ Stenwold had asked them, rhetorically. ‘We have artifice. They’ve made great strides in the last few years, but that’s mostly after they found Tseitus’s original submersible.’ He had managed to speak to the Tseni ambassadors, very quickly, to ask how they dealt with their own seagoing neighbours. They did not trade, they explained. In fact trade was strictly prohibited by both sides, punishable by death. Their history, the near-disaster that their city had staved off, had taught them that, and it bolstered Sten-wold’s determination to get this business right.

  ‘Artifice, some centuries of learning, which could revolutionize the sea-kinden way of life,’ he explained. ‘And what do they have, in order to buy this from us?’ He smiled sadly, thinking of the injustices of history. ‘They have limitless supplies of gold, a metal that they account merely decorative, without intrinsic worth.’

  He had been studying Jodry’s face, when he had said that, and what he had seen there was only reassuring
. Not goggling greed but a sober thoughtful look: Jodry had understood immediately.

  ‘An influx of our newest and most complex inventions would turn Hermatyre inside out. Nobody could then say what might happen. The Edmiracy might be overthrown entirely. Anarchy could ensue… And then there are the Inapt of the sea-kinden, who would soon be driven to the wall. So far, the sea has managed a very polite version of the Apt Revolution. I would not want to undo all that by an over-generous hand. If we tried to turn them into us, we would destroy them.’ He had given the matter plenty of thought. ‘And in recompense, as they connived at their own destruction, they would destroy us in turn. Our currency would become worthless. We would destroy the Helleron mint, which smelts coin for the Lowlands and half the Empire and the Spiderlands, now. Nobody would profit from such a liberalization of trade.’

  He unhitched the boat from the hoist and felt the sea take it, rolling and pitching it as he fumbled for the oars. The muted growl of the Tidenfree’s engine sounded up, and the wooden wall of her hull began to pull away from him, turning his little rowboat in lazy circles along with the swell. He thought he heard a high voice shout his name, and guessed that it was Laszlo wishing him luck, having finally fought his way abovedecks.

  He had not explained the other reason why there must be no open trade, nor even open knowledge regarding the sea-kinden. Jodry, however, had seen at once what would happen if certain of the merchant class heard that there was gold to be had in the sea. Who would be the first of them, Stenwold wondered, to start construction of a fleet of submersibles? Who would mount a mad invasion of the depths, just as Rosander had planned his war on the land? Gold would spur them on, and their machines would grow more and more sophisticated, and the land-kinden would become the enemy that the superstitious sea-kinden believed them to be.

  Stenwold had never rowed before, but Tomasso had carefully explained to him the principles. He paddled about, trying to wheel the boat, turning and turning until it was pointed in the wrong direction and he, by contrast, was facing in the right one. It was, he had to admit, a remarkable view.